


Getting to Yes

by alternatealto



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 11:03:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1548341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alternatealto/pseuds/alternatealto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if a certain infamous moment in a certain restaurant had gone just a little differently?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Getting to Yes

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published on my LiveJournal in 2013.

**Getting to Yes**

 

“Yes,” House said.

Wilson, down on one knee, froze. Still holding out the ring box, he stammered, “W-what?”

“I said, ‘yes’,” House repeated. The elderly woman at the other table beamed and clasped her hands together under her chin; Nora turned away, still covering her mouth, her eyes dancing.  

“But—but I thought – ” Wilson’s triumphant expression was fading, replaced by one of shocked consternation.

“I know. You thought I’d  _never_  give in. But honestly – ” House swept his gaze around the room as if looking for support from his fellow diners, “who could resist this? Look at him!”   There was a murmur of appreciative agreement, particularly from the women in the room.  

House smiled into Wilson’s eyes, enjoying his victim’s stunned helplessness, then reached out and deftly lifted the box from Wilson’s paralyzed fingers. “Ohh,” he cooed, taking out the ring, “you went back and bought the one I was admiring at the jeweller’s the other night!” He slid it onto the ring finger of his left hand, managing to keep his expression from changing when it fit perfectly, and held it up as if adoring the look of it. “Masculine, yet romantic.   I – I don’t know what to say. You know me so well.” He laid the hand with its ring over his heart and tilted his head.“Who could say ‘no’ to something like this? C’mere, baby!” He stood, grabbed Wilson by the shoulders and pulled him up from his knees into a hug, then noticed the other man’s mouth was still hanging open in astonishment.  _Oh, perfect._

A half second later, he was kissing Wilson with everything he had, and the entire restaurant had erupted into applause.

He was going to pay for this later, House thought. Then Wilson’s arms tightened, the kiss shifted, and –  _whoa, what the hell? –_ but it was only a brief instant and Wilson was pulling his mouth away. “I am going to kill you,” he said softly, under cover of the clapping from all around.

“I love you too, baby,” House said aloud for the room to hear. Keeping one arm around Wilson’s waist, he turned to Nora. “You were right. I should never have doubted for a moment. Thank you,” he told her, positively oozing sincerity. She smiled at him, and he noticed she’d gone teary-eyed. Apparently he was an even better actor than he’d realized.

Over Wilson’s shoulder he saw the restaurant’s owner headed for the table, followed by waiters with bottles of champagne and trays of stemware. “On the house!” the restauranteur announced grandly, “Congratulations!” Glasses of wine went to every table, and the entire room stood up for the toast. “Greg and James, everybody! Let’s wish the happy couple all the best!”

Wilson, a fixed smile on his face, lifted his glass, then leaned in as if to kiss his new fiancé before toasting him. “I mean it,” he whispered. “You are so dead, House.”

House simply made the kiss a reality, smirking as the lights from a half-dozen digital cameras flashed around them. Then he lifted his own glass and drained it, gazing all the while into Wilson’s smouldering eyes.

* * * * *

 

“Take it off!”

“Nope.”

“House!” Wilson was in true Wilson mode, striding around the condo’s great room, hair flopping, hands waving at shoulder height. “I can’t believe – no, wait,  _of course_ I can believe you did that to me. But you knew perfectly well it was – ”

“— the moment I’ve waited for for years.”

Wilson kept ranting. “A prank! A  _prank_ , House! Payback for the – wait, what?”   He suddenly stopped dead with his back to House, hands still suspended in mid-air as the other man’s words sank in.

“You heard me.”

“No,” Wilson said, turning around to face him. “O-hoh,  _no_.” He gave a bitter-sounding laugh. “No, House. You do  _not_  get to do this.”

“Do what?” House asked innocently.

“Do . . . whatever it is you think you’re doing here by suddenly pretending to be gay for me!”

“What makes you think I’m pretending?”

“I’m . . . I am not even going to  _dignify_  that with a response. Just give me back the ring, all right?”

“I’ve already told you, no.”

“I need to return it!”

“Too bad. This ring,” House announced, “stays right where it is.” He held both hands to his chest, the right one covering the left protectively. If he fluttered his lashes at Wilson, it was only because he couldn’t resist.

“House, cut it  _out!_  You’re only doing this to . . . to humiliate me. Well, fine, you did! I was embarassed in front of an entire restaurant,  _and_  our upstairs neighbor, who I’ll probably never be able to look in the face again, and – ”

“Just a minute, Mr. Romantic.  _You_  were the one who broke in on my quiet dinner date,  _you_  were the one who declared you loved me, went down on one knee in front of a room full of people, and asked me to marry you. Nobody forced you to do any of that, least of all me, so you can just stop with the accusations, here.”

“You know  _perfectly well_  I never thought – ”

“Exactly.”

Wilson glowered at him, then flung his hands in the air one last time before turning away and heading off to the den, muttering something under his breath that sounded like a string of maledictions in Yiddish.

House stared after him thoughtfully.   

* * * * *

 

 

The reprieve didn’t last, of course: Wilson renewed the assault first thing in the morning, before House had even had his first cup of coffee – which was not only unfair but a major strategic mistake, since an uncaffeinated House was likely to be even less cooperative than a House who was (however grudgingly) awake.

“You’re not wearing that to work.”

House looked down at himself, then blinked at Wilson groggily. “What are you, my mother? I’m wearing what I usually wear to work. If I was awake – ” he yawned hugely and limped toward the coffee maker “—I’d probably also wonder why you care. But I’m not, and I don’t.”   He fumbled a mug out of the cupboard and poured hot coffee into it, slopping a certain amount of it over the rim as he stirred in sugar.

“House, I need you to give me back that ring.”

“Oh,  _that_. I thought we’d already had this conversation,” House slurred through another massive yawn. He took a sip of the coffee and made a face.

“It was my grandfather’s,” Wilson went on, unheeding.

“And now it’s mine.” He added more sugar – Wilson always used too much coffee, or maybe too little water. House was never awake enough to be sure which it was, just that it was so strong he always seemed to need more sugar than he thought he would to take the edge off it.

Now he thought about it, that was true for mornings as well as Wilson’s coffee. And besides –

“Wait. Last night you said you had to return the ring – now you say it was your grandfather’s. What, do you just get it out of hock for special occasions or something?”

“I need to  _return_  it,” Wilson said with a bit of an edge to his overly-patient tone, “to the safe-deposit box. Where it belongs.”

“Belonged,” House corrected him, sipping at his coffee again. Too sweet, but a little more drinkable.

“ _Belongs,_ ” Wilson repeated. “Come on, House. You’ve had your fun, but I need it back.”

“And, as I seem to remember saying before,  _no_.”

“House . . . !”

“You offered it to me. Voluntarily. In front of witnesses, as part of a marriage proposal. You drank a toast after I accepted. I’d say it’s mine.” His eyes held Wilson’s over the edge of his coffee mug.

Wilson’s shoulders slumped. “I should just have told everyone at the restaurant it was a prank.”

“Was it?”

“Wh—what?” Wilson gaped at him. “Yes! Of  _course_  it – I  _told_ you – ”

“Then why  _didn’t_  you tell everyone at the restaurant?” House inquired. Mentally, he awarded himself several bonus points for managing to keep a straight face so early in the morning.

“Because it would have embarassed Nora!” Wilson spluttered. “She – she thought she was having dinner with a gay man! How would she have felt, finding out she was really on a date with a – a  _jackass_  who just wanted to get into her pants?”

“How would she have  _known,_ unless you announced that fact to the entire restaurant?” House asked reasonably, taking a longer sip from his mug. Wilson blinked at him, his expression suddenly uncertain.

“Of course if you  _did_ ,” House went on, _“_ then the odds were good she would’ve thought she was having dinner with a gay man whose partner had just played a heartless joke on him. It would have been a perfect setup – for me.”

Wilson raised his hands slightly and opened his mouth, but House plowed on. “I could have come back to our building with her and begged to stay at her place for the night, rather than face the man who so cruelly humiliated me in public. It would have moved my plan forward by leaps and bounds.

“But you knew you couldn’t do that. Admitting the proposal was only a prank would just make  _you_  look like the jackass, not me. You knew that going in. You had to.” He drained his mug and set it on the counter, never taking his eyes off the other man.

“I – ”

“You,” House said, “deliberately put yourself into a position you couldn’t back out of.  Why?”

“I – ”

“Do you even  _know_  why?”

Wilson’s hands twitched at his sides. He was staring past House now, his expression that of a man who’d added two and two and, against all the odds, gotten six.

House took a step towards him, then another. “Maybe you do. Maybe you’re just afraid to let yourself know.”

“House . . .” It was a half-whisper; Wilson was looking anywhere except at him.

“So I’ll make you a deal,” House went on. “I’ll give the ring back – ” the other man’s eyes snapped back to his, surprised, “—after you let me kiss you again.”

Wilson drew a sharp breath and took a half-step back. His mouth twitched; his eyes darted from House’s face, around the kitchen, and back to House again. “I . . . uh . . .” he began, then trailed off, catching his lower lip between his teeth.

“You survived it once,” House pointed out. He held up the hand with the ring on it.

Wilson’s expression changed to one of determination. “I – okay. One kiss, and you give me back the ring.”

“Right.”

“Wait. How do I know you won’t just . . . hold out for more ransom afterwards?”

“Do I look like a serial kisser?” House asked indignantly. Wilson rolled his eyes, but didn’t demand any further proof of House’s intentions. He held his ground as House stepped up to him and reached out.

If this was the one chance he got, House thought, then he’d make the most of it. Taking the other man into his arms, he did his best to recreate the kiss he’d given Wilson at the restaurant last night, focusing all his attention on it, hoping for the same kind of response he’d sensed briefly then. A few seconds went by, a few more . . . and then Wilson pulled him close and effortlessly took control of the kiss away from him. House’s heart started pounding erratically as he tried getting it back again.

From there it rapidly turned into something between a kiss and a contest – which Wilson, the bastard, finally won with a totally unfair move: brushing his fingers lightly across the sensitive skin at the back of House’s neck. It was a maneuver Stacy had always used to get him to go weak in the knees, and it had an even greater impact coming from Wilson – House barely managed to keep himself upright, and he broke the kiss with a groan.

Wilson waited until House regained his balance, then let go of him and stepped away again, his hand sneaking to the back of his own neck as he silently looked down at the floor. House took a deep breath, and pulled the ring from his finger.

“One kiss, one ring—as agreed,” he said, holding it out to Wilson and hoping the tremor in his voice went unnoticed.

Wilson raised his head then, and there was no mistaking the smugness in his gaze.  “Keep it,” he told House lightly. Just a  _little_  evil sneaked in around the edges of his smile when House froze in shock.

The truth hit House with the same force as any other epiphany. After a few seconds he closed his mouth, shaking his head with unwilling admiration.

“You manipulative  _bitch_ ,” he said, and Wilson’s smile broadened. “You meant it all along. You honestly  _were_  proposing to me, but you knew I’d say ‘no’ unless you did it as a prank: so you deliberately set yourself up to make me think I had you at a disadvantage. You – ” He broke off, so full of admiration for the other man’s cunning that he ran out of words for a moment. Wilson was openly grinning at him, enjoying a rare moment of complete triumph.   “I never even saw it coming,” House admitted at last, shaking his head again.

He was still holding the ring. Wilson reached out and took it, then slid it back into place on House’s fourth finger.   “You did say ‘yes’,” he reminded him when House looked at him uncertainly.

“What about Nora?” House asked, just for something to say that would keep him from saying too much.

“She was in on it from the beginning,” Wilson told him. “How do you think I knew where you were going for dinner?”

It hadn’t even occurred to him to wonder. “I must be losing my touch,” House complained. “Either that, or I’m oxygen-deprived from your kissing.”

“Now that you mention it . . .” Wilson murmured, stepping closer.

He could get used to being oxygen-deprived, House decided a few minutes later.

 

 

 

 


End file.
